The system -- the American one, at least -- is a vast and noble experiment. It has been polestar and exemplar for other nations. But from kindergarten until she graduates from college the girl is treated in it exactly like her brothers. She studies the same subjects, becomes proficient at the same sports. Oh, it is a magnificent lore she learns, education for the mind beyond anything Jane Austen or Saint Theresa or even Mrs. Pankhurst ever dreamed. It is truly Utopian. But Utopia was never meant to exist on this disheveled planet.
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The thing to remember about fathers is, they're men. A girl has to keep it in mind: They are dragon-seekers, bent on improbable rescues. Scratch any father, you find someone chock-full of qualms and romantic terrors, believing change is a threat -- like your first shoes with heels on, like your first bicycle I it took such months to get.
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Please to put a nickel, please to put a dime. How petitions trickle in at Christmas time!
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Our dog died from licking our wedding picture.
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Sisters are always drying their hair. Locked into rooms, alone, they pose at the mirror, shoulders bare, trying this way and that their hair, or fly importunate down the stair to answer the telephone.
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Who could deny that privacy is a jewel? It has always been the mark of privilege, the distinguishing feature of a truly urbane culture. Out of the cave, the tribal teepee, the pueblo, the community fortress, man emerged to build himself a house of his own with a shelter in it for himself and his diversions. Every age has seen it so. The poor might have to huddle together in cities for need's sake, and the frontiersman cling to his neighbors for the sake of protection. But in each civilization, as it advanced, those who could afford it chose the luxury of a withdrawing-place.
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Say what you will, making marriage work is a woman's business. The institution was invented to do her homage; it was contrived for her protection. Unless she accepts it as such --as a beautiful, bountiful, but quite unequal association --the going will be hard indeed.
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A lady is smarter than a gentleman, maybe, she can sew a fine seam, she can have a baby, she can use her intuition instead of her brain, but she can't fold a paper in a crowded train.
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The Enemy, who wears her mother's usual face and confidential tone, has access; doubtless stares into her writing case and listens on the phone.
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My cooking is so bad my kids thought Thanksgiving was to commemorate Pearl Harbor.
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My mother-in-law had a pain beneath her left breast. Turned out to be a trick knee.
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Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy.
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Frigidity is largely nonsense. It is this generation's catchword, one only vaguely understood and constantly misused. Frigid women are few. There is a host of diffident and slow-ripening ones.
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Sticks and stones are hard on bones, aimed with angry art, words can sting like anything but silence breaks the heart.
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The knowingness of little girls Is hidden underneath their curls.
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God knows that a mother needs fortitude and courage and tolerance and flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect of the human soul. But because I happen to be a parent of almost fiercely maternal nature, I praise casualness . It seems to me the rarest of virtues. It is useful enough when children are small. It is important to the point of necessity when they are adolescents.
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Old age is when the liver spots show through your gloves
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A hobby a day keeps the doldrums away.
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Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.
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Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.
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If that's the best joke in the world, then I've never had a face-lift.
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Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the sidewalk before it stops snowing.
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I do not know who first invented the myth of sexual equality. But it is a myth willfully fostered and nourished by certain semi-scientists and other fiction writers. And it has done more, I suspect, to unsettle marital happiness than any other false doctrine of this myth-ridden age.
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Ladies with curly hair have time to spare
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Always be nice to your children because they are the ones who will choose your rest home.
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Christmas is a time when everybody wants his past forgotten and his present remembered
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The advance planning and sense stimuli employed to capture a $10 million cigarette or soap market are nothing compared to the brainwashing and propaganda blitzes used to ensure control of the largest cash market in the world: the Executive Branch of the United States Government.
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Sticks and stones are hard on bones aimed with angry art. Words can sting like anything but silence breaks the heart.
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To be a housewife is ... a difficult, a wrenching, sometimes an ungrateful job if it is looked on only as a job. Regarded as a profession, it is the noblest as it is the most ancient of the catalogue. Let none persuade us differently or the world is lost indeed.
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She's about as feminine as a sidewalk drill.
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